I'm Andy Warren, currently a SQL Server trainer with End to End Training. Over the past few years I've been a developer, DBA, and IT Director. I was one of the original founders of SQLServerCentral.com and helped grow that community from zero to about 300k members before deciding to move on to other ventures.

We’ve haven’t had a good solution for managing money for SQLSaturday and our groups here in Orlando. In the early days I’d put the money in my business account, keep the receipts, figure out what was left to accrue for the next year, and let the accountant do the rest.… Read more

Normally I fly out Monday to spend the week at PASS. It’s good to get there early to adjust to the time change, I like to attend the meetings on Tuesday, and of course Monday night is the networking party that Steve Jones & I have organized the last few… Read more

Today we’re starting on our 11th SQLSaturday here in Orlando. Normally we rotate the leadership between oPASS and MagicPASS, but this year is a bit of change – I’ll be leading this year instead of just contributing. It’s a chance for Shawn and Kendal to take a year breather and… Read more

I read with interest the post from Bob Pusateri that discusses what seems to be the next iteration of the SQLSaturday logo. Informative, calm, and I thought had quite a few valid points. I don’t know that I can be as logical or as calm!

The Murder Accountability Project is worth a look. It’s a reminder that gathering good data is hard, but once you have the data you can do interesting things – like identify serial killings. The site says 220,000 unsolved homicides in the US since 1980. A big number, but not big… Read more

It’s not easy to keep up with tech, here’s an update I missed – you can add params to the connection string to enable retries on connections that were established (in the connection pool) but have since failed. I suspect many apps will cover this in the code that handles… Read more

I wrote Only as Good as Your Auditor for SQLServerCentral because its something I’ve explained to people over and over again. For most of us in IT audits are something we tolerate and try to get done as quickly as we can, a test to pass, and because of that… Read more

Each year I try to something fun for April 1st, though it’s hard to do well. Trying to be funny without crossing any of the many lines we should respect isn’t the easiest thing. Probably the easy target is self – least likely to complain! Still, sometimes there are general… Read more

From time to time we all have to examine our path and decide if we need to make adjustments. Looking at the market, I found a lot of reasons why now is the right time to switch to mySQL. Here’s the top five:

I was a last minute volunteer to speak at the March meeting and used it as a chance to talk about Devops for the DBA as a practice run for my session at the upcoming Orlando Code Camp. One of the nice things about having been to the group as… Read more

I have a server that uses a third party disk encryption product. It’s configured so that the SQL service account and sysadmins have the ability to encrypt/decrypt files. The local system account does not, nor does the local admins group. Good for security, but it causes some pain when… Read more

I’ve had this happen a couple of times with a recent build of SSMS. Something went wrong – resolution change maybe – and it wouldn’t load, error “is not a valid value for property ‘Width'”. I finally tracked it down to this registry key. Editing or deleting fixed the problem. Read more

I’ve been catching up on stuff this week, including reading the January 2017 minutes. It was in-person meeting so a lot was covered. I don’t want to summarize it, you should read it, but there were some trends I noticed I wanted to comment on:

I did a quick review of the 2017 PASS Budget. It’s not a page turner, but it has a lot of good information. I wish there as more context about some of the changes. The following isn’t a summary, just notes about areas I either care about or caught… Read more

Posting this mostly in case I need it again. I needed a merge tool for Git, Kdiff is free and useful, but you have to get all the switches set up if you want full functionality (three way merge). I found the answer on this blog post (a reminder to… Read more

I was just reading The PASS Board Guidance Policy . Overall a reasonable document and absolutely worth reading if you’re thinking about running for the Board. It is missing what I consider a key point about the Executive Committee, so I wanted to write a quick note on that.